Hersman: Plane’s auto-equipment seems to have behaved normally

Investigators have found nothing unusual in the behavior of the automated cockpit equipment on Asiana Flight 214, NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman told reporters Thursday — yet another data point that appears to hint at pilot error as a cause of last weekend’s deadly crash in San Francisco.

While Hersman has consistently said it’s too soon to assign blame for the accident, her answers at Thursday’s media briefing offered no support for the notion that mechanical failure, a control tower shift change or an unexplained flash of light played a significant role.

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For example, investigators found “no anomalous behavior of the autopilot, of the flight director and of the autothrottles,” she said, referring to three types of systems or instrumentation in the cockpit.

Earlier briefings had raised the possibility that one of the plane’s automated systems had malfunctioned, even though Hersman emphasized the pilots were still responsible for setting and monitoring those systems.

The crash, which left two dead and dozens injured, occurred when the pilots tried to land the Boeing 777 while flying about 40 mph slower than its target speed, and low enough that the plane’s tail struck a seawall. Thursday’s gathering was the NTSB’s last on-site media briefing about the accident.

Hersman also cast skepticism on two theories that have appeared in the Korean media about possible causes of the crash.

She said the pilot who was at the controls during the landing, Lee Gang-guk, told investigators he didn’t think a flash of light he saw about 30 seconds before the crash “affected his vision because he could see the instruments.”

On Wednesday, Hersman told reporters that Lee had said he was blinded by the flash. But the cockpit voice recorder shows no mention of the flash, Hersman said, and neither of the other two pilots in the cockpit mentioned it.

Lee also told the NTSB he saw a “bright point source of light that could have been a reflection of the sun, but he wasn’t sure,” Hersman said, adding that investigators would look at the location of the sun during the incident to determine if that was possible.

The pilot told investigators that the light wasn’t a laser, Hersman said in a TV interview earlier Thursday.

Hersman also shot down a report in Korean media contending that a shift change in the air traffic control tower in San Francisco could have left the pilots without guidance at a crucial moment in landing. She said the final contact between the tower and the plane occurred 90 seconds before impact, well before things went wrong.

In past briefings, Hersman has also noted that the pilots — not air traffic control — are ultimately responsible for landing the plane safely.

Hersman said it was unlikely a passenger fiddling with an iPad or BlackBerry caused the crash, saying, “We have no indication at this time that any personal electronics interfered in the performance of the aircraft.”